'Connect the dots' like Steve Jobs

“We signed contracts for the sale of 2 ships and we lack capacity here, so 1 needs to be built elsewhere. Needless to say that it has to be completed within the agreed timeframe and budget and, as it will have our company logo, the quality should be first class. We have never done anything like this before, but this is your assignment, good luck”, and a 4-inch-thick binder (the contract) was slid across the table. It was end of June 2008 and I was still getting to know the company after joining that same month. My ‘assignment’ was clear: find a shipyard in China and subcontract-project manage-deliver that ship according specification and agreement. The company wants satisfied clients, naturally. I was excited as this was exactly the kind of challenge that I was looking for when I decided to join the company a couple of months earlier.

When I drove back to my own office I was pondering the situation and how I had ended up here, in my car with a new assignment, today. Thinking back to my days in university and the various companies and industries that I had worked for. And then it struck me: the experience and skills that I had gained over the previous 15 years were exactly right for this new assignment. Not ‘handy’ or ‘supportive’ or ‘close’, no, exactly right. Thinking the other way around, if I had to develop a career path to prepare someone for this specific assignment, it would probably look a lot like my past. Wasn’t that unbelievable? It was really a perfect match. At that moment I was able to, what Steve Jobs called, connect the dots.

When I was reading about the life of Steve Jobs I ran into his commencement address at Stanford, June 12 2005 (https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc). What Steve has described so elegantly is exactly what I experienced driving to my office. And as a person who has never been able to plan his career, I couldn’t agree more with Steve’s statement that connecting the dots is something you can only do looking backward and not looking forward. His advice is to do what you love and find something to trust in: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Do what you love and trust that somehow the dots will connect in the future. I have to admit that following this advice is probably much easier if your bank account provides sufficient security and you don’t have to worry about the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Nevertheless, I have personally experienced and try to follow Steve’s advice. I am a believer and I have seen prove and my advice to you is to give it a try: follow your own ‘beliefs’ and trust that someday, when looking back, you will be able to ‘connect the dots’ like Steve Jobs did, and it will make all the difference in your life.